Christian Awe

Beginning his painting career as a graffiti writer on the streets of Berlin in the early 90s, Christian Awe has transitioned through multiple spheres from street writing to calligraphy, design, architecture and finally painting. His work with painting is a unique symbiosis of graffiti and abstract expressionism that utilizes flowing colors as transitions, movement, and rhythm. On canvas the exposed color is only one of many layers of paint that oscillate between background and foreground.

Awe studied under George Baselitz, one of Germanys most important contemporary artists, and later pursued advance studies with Daniel Richter at the Berliner Universität der Künste. Presently, he works from his loft in the Lichtenberg district of Berlin and shows his work in galleries around the globe. His recent works are increasingly abstract, dynamic and bare an intense chromaticity. In 2011 Christian Awe was selected for the Princeton Scholarship Artist in Residence. Donald Kuspit, renowned New York art critic affirms: “Awe’s mobilization of colors – almost always hot and passionate although sometimes sublimely cool, as his blues and greens tend to be – restores vitality to abstraction, making it more seductive than ever.”